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The End of Competition

School days are the most fun-filled days for learning new things. But for most students these days could also be the fiercest days. There are bullies and rivalries and there are races to become topnotchers and dean’s listers. Students compare everything from their pencil cases to school grades. The Darwinian principle of “survival of the fittest” is a common place. The joy of learning wanes. In our schools we have first learned the harsh realities of our world: Competition always rules the day.

Honestly, it is actually upsetting to see how this paradigm of competition created so much suffering, especially since this is the governing power in every context of human interaction. We have seen the battles between politicians during elections, killings between government and rebels, and rivalries among businesses. Soap operas are spiced up with scenes of actors slapping each other, fighting over a single lover. Mainstream Japanese anime and manga are all teeming with tournaments of ego-charged heroes jousting with their equally egoistic villains. The invention of reality TV has involved ordinary people with draining patience as they trample each other to get the highly coveted prize – a game of reptilian behaviors the whole world enjoys watching every primetime. People betted on their winning player in bloody sports like boxing. Sports, be it individual or team, have become a fertile ground for competition to fare, where both athletes and audience perpetuate the wars between winners and losers.

The entire structure of our nations, organizations, and families lives out a hierarchical pattern: the one who stands on the highest owns the most resources, wields the greatest power, gains the best privileges, holds the widest control. He or she often epitomizes a conventional leader with such stronghold that dictates the fate of his or her constituents. These are all elements of competition, a culture that generated so much stress and depression among people regardless of what they have attained.

Ending the world of competition is our step to strive seeking what is common to us all – Love.

We have competed with each other in many trivial ways: wearing the best fashion; having the latest gadgets; getting the famous degrees in the most prestigious universities; investing the most expensive houses and cars; holding the most ideal positions; and practicing the most lucrative careers. Our gauge of success is based on the quantity of things and the quality of our statuses. In a competition-driven world, those who have more, live more. This is the same dog-eat-dog world numbed of true meaning and purpose of serving humanity. Instead, our competitiveness pushes us to serve our hungry, insatiable souls.

The disturbing irony is seen when we often say that we have relationships with our loved ones, friends and acquaintanes, and yet we often describe our dynamics with them as if we have lived a life with our archenemies. We relate our stories like an epic battle in which we are the heroes and they are the villains. To say that this fight with the people in our lives is a kind of relationship is a form of delusion. True relationships are naturally harmonious while complementing differences. Our society and dynamics with people are best called competition in the way they exist.

photo from Microsoft Office Image

In the name of such honor, fame, power, principle, award, big prize or simply feeling good, we have fought, harmed, hurt, insulted, betrayed, oppressed, ostracized and killed each other in a belief that these goals are more important than our relationship with people. We have forgotten how precious the presence of the other is, just because we believe that it is more important for us to win or to become the best. We continuously live in the illusion that the winner takes it all. The oft-quoted Buddha’s wisdom “in a battle, winners and losers both lose,” goes against the grain in a polarized world. His ancient truth echoes the teachings of the wisest sages who walked on Earth. Until we reconcile with our enemies and competitors, our notions of winning remains futile. Competition is always a way to lose.

It is an old enigma: why do we seek to compete with each other? Its Latin origin tells an interesting story. Competere means “to strive in common” or “to seek together.” Competition’s true meaning has been left in oblivion. Our inner desire is really to be at (not to beat) one with the other, to find our oneness and to work together for the whole humanity. But we ended up in fighting and unbearable divisiveness. We must again seek together as one being. Ending the world of competition is our step to strive seeking what is common to us all – Love.

9 thoughts on “The End of Competition”

I believe we are undergoing a paradigm shift: from the competition paradigm to the co-creation paradigm. The energy behind pre-21st Century competition will be transmuted to the energy of co-creation in the 21st Century. As you correctly pointed out, the true meaning of “competition” had been lost. So, in the true sense, competition will not end but will be rediscovered instead. Right?🙂 What was once a fight will become a dance of dynamic co-creation. The increasing pressures of global disasters (man-made and natural) and climate change is forcing the coalescing and fusion of the higher, integrated Human Family consciousness and technologies into new infrastructures (replacing the old-paradigm, collapsing ones) that will accelerate the mass-consciousness-expanding paradigm shift, making co-creation not only possible but also easy, natural, and highly productive. This is what I see.

Thanks, Shyam Tony. Yes, competition will be redefined and rediscovered. And in that sense, we will experience more of our differences not as weapons to win but tools to create and co-create, as you just pointed out.

I bet you feel as excited as I do! This transformation is coming in no time!

Great article indeed Rem yes I think we are all beginning to see the difference as we shift into Collective Consciousness …It is indeed an exciting time to be here in the NOW and drop all of our old belief systems that never really worked anyway..As we become “One with all creation and all that is.”… there is no need for competition we just flow with the Divine Flow ..

Competition, as countless many know it, is inherently separative and fragmentary. The root of this is…attachment to the ego, which expresses in separative and fragmentary ego-centeredness. There is nothing wrong with the ego, which is necessary to experience and manifest one’s creative and unifying nature in the world of manifestation. It is like the avatar one needs to be able to play in the virtual reality 3D graphics environment of the video game in the computer. The problem only starts when there is ATTACHMENT to the ego…or misidentifying the ego as who one really is. Ego attachment is taking the illusion of separation and duality…as actual reality (taking illusion as actual reality is delusion). Consequently, there is a temporary loss of awareness of the actual reality of wholeness behind the apparent reality of separation and duality.

Competition, comparisons…have delusory meaning and reality only where there is a loss of awareness of the actual reality of wholeness. Our personality vessels are as jigsaw puzzle pieces, totally unique parts of the one jigsaw puzzle picture. Each piece has no meaning apart from the wholeness of the picture. Within the wholeness of the picture, no piece is better than another. To those who are awake to the actual reality of the wholeness of the one jigsaw puzzle picture…competition, comparison have no meaning or reality whatsoever. There is only the joyful journey toward infinite expressions of unity, harmony, oneness!

When you play the jigsaw puzzle in the computer, you start with one picture on the monitor screen. When you click “start game”, the picture appears to crumble into a clutter of countless seemingly meaningless pieces on the screen. The illusion of separation and duality is necessary to be able to play the game of transforming apparent fragmentation to wholeness. But even as you perceive the apparently separate pieces on the screen, the wholeness of the jigsaw puzzle picture remains undefiled in the hard drive. But if you lose awareness of the actual reality of the wholeness of the picture, you would probably start comparing the pieces and perceiving some as better than others…and start pitting them against each other…totally clueless as to the objective of the game. But to one who remains aware of the wholeness, even when it is like the sun at night, it is pure joy to rediscover the oneness of the pieces! In the same light, even as there appears to be separation and duality in the monitor screen of intellectual mind…to one who remains aware of the wholeness of all in the heart drive, all the apparently separate fragments of consciousness invariably fall in their proper places in the wholeness of the one unified field of pure consciousness!

As sure as the sun rises in the horizon of Man’s consciousness, there will be a paradigm shift from competition to co-creation, as there will be a paradigm shift from ownership to stewardship…and all these symptoms of separative and fragmentary egotism will all fade as the darkness of night in the coming of a new day! Indeed, the end of the world is the beginning of the new world…as the end of the caterpillar is the beginning of the butterfly!

Amen, Surf! This is one clarifying statement about how ego serves its true purpose. Without profound awareness, ego is dangerous. However, ego itself is the awareness of unawareness; the essential dimension in which we are able to see our differences. Ego becomes too troubling when it is used against the other. But when we begin to use it as lens of our appreciation of the multitude of existence, we will again discover how ego helps us, like a prism, to see many colors from one light, without any sense of comparison or competition.